Laboratory Study

Organizer:
Center for Science and Technology Studies (STS Center)
Project start date:
2019-11-27

For already more than a score there have been constant debates over the crisis in the Russian science. The situation has been monitored, some projects have been brought forward. This situation however altered in October 2009 when a group of former Russian citizens, who are now among the leading American and European scholars, sent an open letter to President Medvedev. This was an event that had some particular impact on the situation in the Russian science. The letter contained not only keen criticism of how the Russian science was organized but also a concrete action plan of how to reform the system with the assistance of the academia itself. These proposals could have fallen on deaf ears. Yet, luckily they coincided with the President's policy statements on the country-wide modernization and the need for innovation economy. As a response to the letter President Medvedev has put forward a reform program. Some authors of the letter and other prominent Russian scholars and experts were invited to work further on the program and then to implement it. Up to now the work on the reform has not been finished; a wide public debate continues over the prospects of the reforms, the efficiency of the Russian Academy of Science, the possibilities to apply Western models to the Russian reality and the question about what modernization model to choose for our country. In this situation of exigencies and urgent need for expertise the traditional approaches to the study of the Russian science have suddenly turned out to be insufficient.

Indeed, since the 1990s there has been a number of academic and journalistic works published, devoted to the crisis of natural sciences research, have been published. Very often such studies have similar research design which can be viewed as a standard one: they comprise either a statistics analysis (financing data, average age, migration dynamics, etc), or surveys and interviews with research fellows. Despite the great value of statistical data and the contributions the surveys make to the analysis of the official statistics, such studies quite often face some discrepancies. For instance, statistical data shows that those research fields that, according to this statistics, get substantial financing, do not meet the effectiveness expectations. Interviews with scholars help understand some peculiarities of those research fields, which can not be reflected by the quantitative data. Yet, such studies often reproduce stereotypes the insiders share (say, very often the interviewees believe the increase in financing to be the best way of improving the situation; yet, the last years' data show the invalidity of this position).

It is clear that the methods described trace the factors that are exogenous to the activities of the laboratories. They analyze economic and political conditions, but the very organization of how the research teams work still presents a black box when only the input, that is the financial flows, and the output, namely effectiveness and efficiency, are known. This approach makes the reforming of the system look like an experiment: “if factor X is added, factor Y is removed, will this help the citation indices of the Russian scholars grow?”. There is a consensus among the majority of researchers that there is a clear need to develop new strategies for monitoring the work of research communities and teams. Laboratory study can become one of the solutions. How does a laboratory function? What are the major infrastructural, intellectual and symbolic resources needed for the given research field? How is science structured in the same areas, but under different social and economic conditions? To what extent is it possible to adopt other countries' experiences to the Russian reality, where is the “patch” needed? Ethnographic methods allow to analyze the way knowledge, resources, agents function on a micro-level, that is in a laboratory, and to point out problems, sore spots of the scientific community; as a result, this can be helpful while elaborating on the reform measures.

The laboratory study has been one of the main fields of the science and technology studies since the 1980s. In recent years due to the changes in the economic systems, the laboratory study's research methods have become frequently applied to study the science-intensive companies, such as technology companies, industrial parks, universities, high-tech industries, etc.

The current project on Practices of constructing scientific knowledge by the examples of biological laboratories in Russia and the US is conducted by Anna Artushina, the Center's research fellow


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